Child of 9/11

September 30, 2013September 30, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

“While these terrorists have visited unbelievable savagery on us, we must collectively avoid the temptation towards unthinking revenge, the path the US took after 9/11.”

Those remarks published this morning in Nairobi actually made me reflect on our own looming national crises coming up this midnight and again and again right through the end of the year.

The American Right’s paths since 9/11 have been terribly “unthinking,” reflexive and self-destructive to be sure, but also a great misery for us all.

I began to wonder if the stew we’re in right now in America really has its roots in the bad policies which came out of 9/11, and if Kenya will avoid that same destructive path.

Both societies had regular terrorist attacks before these great ones. Kenya, in fact, has suffered as many deaths and injuries as Westgate from nearly three terrorist attacks monthly in the last two years, and more in the single 1998 bombing of the American embassy. American had an almost regular series of attacks starting all the way back to the Achille Lauro and Pan Am 103.

But like 9/11, Westgate was different. The difference with 9/11 in America was its scale. The difference with Westgate was its savagery:

“The killing of young children in cold blood, and the reported acts of torture constitute a new level of barbarity with which terrorism [in Kenya] is usually not associated,” George Kegoro reflected today in Nairobi.

The American Congress made historic, incorrect decisions in the 15 years since 9/11. The loss of national resources wasted in useless wars, and the diversion of attention to our own needs at home combined to produce a vengeful, angry, hard-nosed and “unthinking” America.

And so we arrive at today, where legislators don’t legislate and politicians defined by the political system want to shut it down. They want to eliminate themselves and replace it with nothing.

Like some child incapable of saying, “Sorry,” they lash out at everything.

Self-destruction supreme. Are we punishing ourselves with all the misdeeds of the last one and half decades?

Don’t follow us, Kenya. So far it looks like you won’t.

In fact, lead this angry child into something better. Please.

Whiteness over Westgate

September 27, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This horrible week is ending. Finally, whiffs of smoke have stopped coming out of the Westgate Mall. But some facts must be tidied up before we surpass the media’s modicum of attention.

Technically, the White Widow is not yet implicated, but I believe she is. Britain’s arrest warrant for her yesterday is the clue. Conceivably she was not there as reported by several witnesses, as she is devious enough to have ordered one of her henchmen to masquerade her. But I for one believe she was the mastermind.

Given the secrecy of the investigation it will be a long time before we have hard evidence of who led the attack. But enough has already leaked out to seriously suggest westerners from the U.S. and Britain were involved, if not leading the effort.

Just as the attackers were likely from around the world, so were the victims. This morning 33 of the victims have been identified, including 3 Canadians, a famous Ghanian author, 2 Indians, a physician from Peru, a South Korean woman who had recently moved from Dubai, 3 Australians, a tourist from China, 2 tourists from France, a man from Trinidad & Tobago and 3 South Africans.

As happens with so many tragic events in Africa, this is a global story as much if not more than an African one. Its causes, strategies and ultimately its implications are pointedly universal in nature. Thinking of this as a Kenyan or African “problem” is intellectually juvenile.

Al-Shabaab is not resurgent. It drives me nuts the way American media and politicians believe this is some clarion call to urgency that rabid Muslims are again on the crusade. Rather, it looks to me like a dying gasp of an organization in great disarray that has received a spark from wayward westerners. But that’s far too complicated a story for a 4-minute segment on the evening news.

The subsequent attack in Wajir was not unusual, I’m terribly sad to say.

Fox News was not the only one to grossly exaggerate this event and irresponsibly tie it to Westgate. More than 70 people have already been killed this year in this troubled border region of Somalia where fighting has gone on more or less nonstop since 1993.

Life will return to normal in Nairobi and Kenya much faster than it did in New York and the U.S. after 9/11, and not because 9/11 was so much larger an event. Remember that Kenya suffered 3 to 4 times as many people killed and injured in the 1998 bombing of the American embassy as it did last weekend.

But last weekend truly had a greater impact on Kenya than 1998 and I think it equal to 9/11’s attack on America. The country is far more educated, interconnected, cosmopolitan and developed than in 1998. There is a greater shock because the attack interrupted a life routine that is so much more complex and modern than in 1998.

Life will return to normal more quickly, because that’s the African way. As I said in yesterday’s blog, that’s why ultimately terrorism as we know it today will be defeated by the African’s remarkable compassion and forgiveness.

“Forgiving is not forgetting; it’s actually remembering–remembering and not using your right to hit back,” Desmond Tutu said.

A long journey to break the endless cycle of violence.

Now That It’s Not Over

September 26, 2013September 26, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 5 Comments

The wound is still raw. Healing has hardly begun. But one of the most powerful and critical lessons ever for America to embrace is being taught right now: Mwalimu Kenya.

Al-Qaeda “won its war against America,” Kenya’s famous writer Obbo said today. But in Kenya in stark contrast al-Qaeda has released “the compassionate side of the nation” and by so doing, has already lost its battle.

How simply true. Please follow the link above and read Obbo’s column that appeared today in Kenya’s main newspaper.

Obbo meticulously details the aftermath of 9/11, carefully enumerating deaths and money spent on our retaliation in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also reminding us of equally vindictive actions that ultimately backfire:

“Thousands of students could no longer get into America. Many ended up in Canada, whose universities now have an edge over America’s in scientific research.”

He joins the large global body of scholars and analysts who refer to the years since 9/11 as “America’s imperial overstretch.”

The sadness/grief that I’ve been walking around with since the weekend has a pretty simple explanation and is, of course, nowhere near as great as Nairobi residents. We can’t find some people, and that’s the current breathless fear that they are among those lost.

But there is a unique character to this sadness that is uniquely African, something I’ve been trying to understand all my life. We in the west often call it fatalism and sometimes with even greater denigration, nihilism.

It’s neither. It’s what Obbo understands as compassion. It’s counterintuitive to us in the west to link compassion with sadness, but how simply true! If you are truly empathetic to suffering you can’t help but be saddened by it.

That’s the African way. And it’s the excruciatingly depressing reason that slavery flourished there, that colonialism raped its lands, that the Cold War treated states as puppets, that western pharmaceuticals considered it hardly more than a mad scientist’s lab.

And that now it is destined to take the brunt of the War on Terror. And take it, it will, and by so doing, it will defeat terror, just like Obbo says.

The west is already revving up its war cries. There’s nothing our hell-bent right would like better than another war.

And that, as Obbo so beautifully points out, is exactly what the terrorists want. If you invoke the Israeli mantra of an eye-for-an-eye, you lose, they win.

Obama should read Obbo. There are as many fatalities and injuries from the “collateral” damage of a few drones attacks as in the single attack on Westgate. This back-and-forth retribution will never end. America will never get weaker. The terrorists will never be eliminated. It is an endless cycle of violence.

So do you just turn the other cheek?

Yes, sort of. Security will improve in Kenya, now. The west who started the wars on terror will perforce be more involved and that will, in fact, likely better protect at least urban Kenyans.

But it’s going to be a long, hard slug for Kenya, a miserable journey that in fact started several years ago. Although the scale of the many smaller attacks throughout the country was not as dramatic as Westgate, there have been many of them. As in Nigeria, and Pakistan, and of course now Iraq and Afghanistan, a week hardly passes without some kind of terror attack.

Obbo’s right that in the end compassion prevails over terror. There is no other civilized alternative.

But it’s also time to get real, folks. This isn’t the 17th century. Nairobi is no further from Chicago using a cell phone than your neighbor down the street.

Kenya is far less capable of uplifting the world than America: of building not just bridges over rivers but between countries. It’s time that we tone it down, realize our global responsibilities and do so with the type of unqualified compassion that Africa has miraculously sustained through the entire modern era, a period of history where Africa is never more than a victim.

It’s time that change. It’s time that the entire world recognize that the enduring compassion of Africa is the final solution for attaining world peace.

The Real Disneyland

September 24, 2013September 24, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The Westgate Mall attack was al-Shabaab’s dying gasp. There will be more attacks in East Africa, in London, in the U.S., but not from the old al-Shabaab. Not from what was left of the group that was wiped out in Westgate.

Many British analysts believe the attack was led by a fellow Brit, Samantha Lewthwaite. If this is true, it means the organization al-Shabaab has imploded.

The “White Widow” as she was called was essentially the last well-known al-Shabaab commandant. All the others had been killed over the last year.

Possibly less than a month or two ago, an Alabama citizen, al-Shabaab leader Omar Hammami, was killed in an internicine fire fight. He died along with a British compatriot, Osama al-Britani.

So three of the fragile top leadership of al-Shabaab who remained after Kenya routed the group from Somalia are dead. Two Brits, one a woman, and one American.

On PBS yesterday, Kenya’s foreign minister said there were an additional “two or three” Americans fighting as jihadists in the Westgate battle who were killed.

Think about this. Think about this carefully.

Few true journalists or analysts of anything will ever predict the near end to some movement, for fear they’ll be wrong and lose their position. I don’t have to worry about that. I hired myself.

And yes I could be wrong and by so saying I’m honestly diminishing my conviction, but my gut nevertheless tells me otherwise.

Reports that al-Shabaab still controls much of Somalia are incomplete. Al-Shabaab was rarely a coherent single organization, although it did coalesce for several years.

What I suspect is that the warlord society of Somalia, part of which loosely allied itself to al-Shabaab, may be doing so, again. If that’s true, al-Shabaab today is not a trans-national affiliate of al-Qaeda but rather a local political movement, retracting into what it was more than a decade ago.

The Council on Foreign Relations has prepared an excellent and brief primer on al-Shabaab that demonstrates this possibility well.

Does it matter that this one terrorist organization is expiring?

Yes, but it hardly ensures Kenya or the rest of the world that there will be no future attacks. What was left of al-Shabaab were foreigners, not Somalis and many weren’t even Arabs. They may have been Muslims but not even that is certain.

What they are, CBS reported yesterday evening, are wayward kids from developed countries like the U.S. and Britain.

The end of al-Shabaab does not bring an end to wayward kids from Minneapolis.

And that’s the second thought I want you to revisit. A terrorist act is pretty easy to pull off, today. It’s a rush for someone depressed. It’s a mission for someone ungrounded and otherwise uninspired.

“It’s the real Disneyland,” one al-Shabaab fighter told CBS.

Fighting clubs exist all around the world. The normal amoralism of a criminal is easily coopted by some ideology, whether that’s jihadism or some other cultism, and I seriously doubt that any of the actual fighters have studied Zen or Marx.

They’re looking for action and meaning, something they’re unable to get at home. And when they do something bad, we tax our poor to fund a megalothic war machine when we should be taxing the rich to fund schools that inspire young people.

When they pull off a mission at a poorly protected Westgate that a inner city gang from Chicago could have pulled off just as well, we respond by sending a dozen generals and Navy Seals when we should respond by sending social workers and community aid.

And when things go south for the jihadists, their amoralism becomes nihilism. They go out with a bang.

“It’s the real Disneyland,” one al-Shabaab fighter told CBS.

Backfires at the West Gate

September 23, 2013September 23, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Kenya didn’t deserve this, but as America’s proxy in the war against terror in Africa, it was all but inevitable. This is Kenya’s 9/11.

It didn’t have to be this way. Until little more than a year ago, Kenya stayed out of the fray between terrorists and The West that was combating them worldwide. With the greatest terrorist state to its side, Somalia, it managed peaceful coexistence.

Not that it was easy. The massive Dadaab refugee camp on the border with Somalia was numbered in fractions of a million people and was putting enormous strains on the Kenyan economy and security forces.

Home grown sympathizers of the Somalia terrorists, particularly in the heavily Muslim coastal areas of Kenya, had carried out small grenade attacks and kidnapings, several of tourists.

But compared to the steady and growing breadth and scale of terrorism throughout the country all this year, culminating with Saturday’s attack on the Westgate Mall, it was almost par for the course in the age of world terrorism.

What changed a year ago?

It is widely called the Kenyan invasion of Somalia, and Kenyan troops remain in Somalia having successfully ousted al-Shabaab from power. But it is more accurately America and France’s war, using Kenya as our proxy.

And I don’t mean only ideologically or symbolically. If you’ve read my blogs since the October, 2011, invasion, you’ll have followed the growing presence of American troops and advisors, the large number of drones and the many French warships in the area.

This is all going to plan. And the plan, Obama’s and Hollande’s, was to make the west and their own countries in particular, safer. And they’ve done that.

At the expense of Kenya.

I am an American with my past and part of my soul in Kenya. Do I feel safer? As an American, yes.

But Kenyans have taken the hit, so that we Americans didn’t. And the garbage we heard this weekend from the hate-mongers in Congress and the T-Party people like Steve King of Iowa, make my blood boil. They are so intensely ignorant of the facts, and so wholly unsympathetic to misery, I’m not sure what those of us with reasonable minds can possibly do.

Kenya had been dealing with terrorism – as painful as it was – in a much more correct way until America and France got heavily involved in the last several years. Now, like America in the aftermath of 9/11, Kenya has no choice but to increase the fight they didn’t start.

And that will intensify the battle in Kenya even as worldwide terror diminishes painfully slowly.

It is so sad and such a replay of history. The age of slavery, the period of colonialism which followed and the subsequent Cold War dependencies foisted on new African states … all of these seemingly endless periods of African misery enormously benefitted the developed world with little regards for the African human being.

And so it happens, again.

Terrorism against America and France is much diminished for all sorts of reasons, but in very large part because we’ve found a way to keep it keep it far from our shores. Obama may be ending America’s great fires of war, but he’s done so in part by starting back fires.

If the Kenyan gate burns down, the fire comes home. So don’t worry, Kenya, we’ll be sure to help… you burn some more.

A Real Gem of a Guy

September 20, 2013September 20, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

After several decades of trying to reel in Zimbabwe, the European Union just gave up. Sanctions beginning with mining and diamonds will soon be lifted. Who’s running the show up there in Brussels?

Most Europeans consider Zimbabwe one of their greatest diplomatic failures. The country remains a rogue state ruled by a ruthless dictator who has managed to all but destroy an economy that had one of the greatest potentials in Africa.

Robert Mugabe is 90 years old and has been in power since 1980. He was a freedom fighter much admired in the west when he led a major faction against Ian Smith, the white man who lead “UDI” – Unilateral Declaration of Independence – from Britain in 1962.

Rhodesia, as it was then called, was the brainchild of Cecil Rhodes, who in the last half of the 19th century made the country with brute force. Rhodes was probably the richest man in the world at the time who believed to insanity that Britain should rule Africa from bottom to top.

Britain wasn’t all that adverse to the idea, despite public protestations, so they let the rogue Rhodes into the wilds to massacre tribes, build railways and demarcate his own country.

Rhodesia became one of the most productive, beautiful, peaceful countries in Africa. Its economy blossomed with modern agriculture, mining for a variety of ores including diamonds, and tourism. Although pointedly, all this production was run by whites, British settlers who also believed like Rhodes that Westminster was Olympus.

But when it was time for Independence in the early 1960s, there was only 1 white for every 16 blacks. Ian Smith and his white Rhodesians didn’t need to hire Nate Silver to predict an outcome.

So they took over the country from Britain in 1962. Yes, that’s correct. British settlers took over a British colony. Remind you of anything? Ian Smith more than once called himself the George Washington of Africa.

Times had changed, and the war which followed wasn’t with Britain. It was with blacks like Robert Mugabe, and after 18 years and a lot of European sanctions on white Rhodesia, Britain and the U.S. brokered a peace agreement.

The agreement fixated a constitution for ten years that didn’t give the whites any more power than blacks, but institutionalized the power that they negotiated in the agreement in a way that couldn’t be changed.

For that ten years Robert Mugabe was a very good president … at least we all thought so, and frankly, so did many of the whites. It was a time of tourism explosion in Zimbabwe – since it was now peaceful after so many years.

I was deeply involved with two companies run by two white Senators. They loved Mugabe.

But after that ten years and the constitution could be changed by majority vote, Mugabe did. And his vindictiveness started to show.

He began redistributing land, mostly from white farmers. OK. To be expected, right? But with time it became more and more gruesome and the distribution was hardly fair. The land was given not to people of need but to his supporters. Then his cronies. Then his ministers.

Today the next richest and most powerful man in the country is the head of the army, Minister of Defense, Emmerson Mnangagwa. He is the richest because the land which was given to him by Mugabe includes Zimbabwe’s diamond mines.

Mnangagwa is rich despite European sanctions, and that’s the point of those who argue the sanctions became useless. But the EU itself has estimated that Zimbabwe revenues will increase by Euro 400 million annually as the diamond sanctions are lifted.

Others claim that a major motivation is that Belgium wants the business of cutting the diamonds.

“Too late,” says Zimbabwean spokesman, Rugare Gumbo.

Whatever the reason, Zimbabwe is poised to get much richer. And as time goes on, Zimbabwe is little more than a smaller and smaller and closer and closer group of thugs.

ÇA SUFFIT!

September 19, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

One white European president is battling three black African despots in what might be the world’s biggest attack on corruption ever seen. Fast cars, Bond’s jet yachts, secret logging of rainforest jungles and the plight of Africa democracy are all at stake.

President Francois Hollande is the first French leader to refuse the cozy, often illegal and until now mutually beneficial relationships French Presidents have developed with Francophone African leaders.

Moreover, he has given the nod to French prosecutors and judges to continue massive investigations into the “ill-gotten gains” by three corrupt African despots.

These ill-gotten gains game from former French presidents. They are the proceeds from business deals removed from regulation by presidential decree, from aid that intentionally required no accounting, and from outright illegal money laundering that former French presidents forbid prosecutors from pursuing. That was the French way.

Says Hollande: “Ça suffit!’

Endorsing the legal nit-picking that a number of progressive French NGOs have been doing for years (see one of the most prominent, Sherpa), Hollande has reversed French policy of nearly the last century.

France’s role in Africa has been huge. Twenty-three of Africa’s current 53 countries were French colonies (compared to only 18 for Great Britain) and the total 2010 per capita GDP in those countries is about a quarter greater than the former British colonies.

America tends to concentrate on the former British colonies like South Africa and Kenya, but France’s role especially in the big oil-producing countries has been huge.

For all the years since African independences in the 1960s and 1970s, French politicians have benefitted enormously from the growing wealth of their former colonies.

In direct contrast with the British, backroom deals and presidential waivers for regulation and other prosecution have developed an incorrigible relationship that has enormously increased corruption at the top, both in France and Africa.

That’s really changing, now.

Hollande is actively going after the “ill-gotten gains” of many African despots, and focused current attention on three: President Denis Sassou Nguesso of the Republic of Congo, President Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea and the now-deceased President Omar Bongo of Gabon.

There are others. But these three have enormous financial holdings in France, and there is a good chance the French government will now prevail in taking those back.

It is an enormously positive step for the French to have taken.

Bon chance, Hollande!

Poaching? Who’s Poaching?

September 17, 2013September 17, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Elephant poaching is increasing, unorganized, ad-hoc and much more likely organized by corrupt Ugandan and Congolese government soldiers than rebels or militia.

Although rebels like what’s left of the LRA also poach, they are not the principal poachers. In fact, they probably have an extremely minor role. And news reports suggesting otherwise make it increasingly difficult for us to solve the problem of increased elephant poaching.

So says Kristof Titeca after more than a year of field work in Garamba National Park in The Congo, a young post-doc from Belgium, in an article posted today.

It’s only work and analysis like this, which rarely percolates into the world media, that gives us a handle on how to deal with the current increase in elephant poaching. It’s equally important in suggesting that established news media has more interest in fanning dying embers of scandals than digging for the truth.

Titeca’s research and analysis is about ivory poaching. But he can’t help but wonder why not-for-profits out raising money, like the established world media find it so necessary to make these untrue links:

“One cannot help thinking that these reports are primarily concerned with trying to bring the LRA back into the limelight, in a context where its reduced violence makes it much harder to do so.”

And so Titeca veers slightly from his field work about elephants and ivory to find a couple references showing how diminished the LRA has become. His own work has concluded the same.

News delivery is so entrenched and institutionalized that reality is fixed like photograph. Often today in Africa, you have to turn to young kids outside the media system to get the real story.

There are a few precious sources in established media, and Titeca for example applauds Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times. But he doesn’t applaud any NGO or charity organization, and I expect because there aren’t any to applaud.

Titeca’s research is comprehensive. He details the trail from the initial killing to the traders and middleman to the airports that finally export it. Although established media focuses on Dar-es-Salaam and the Kenyan coast of Mombasa as major exit conduits, Titeca’s own research points squarely to Uganda.

As I’ve often written elephant poaching today is totally different from the plague that nearly exterminated the beast in the 1970s and 1980s, but those days gave rise to public awareness and the birth of numerous then good charity organizations.

Those organizations just can’t get it right, this time. In part because their very successful method of helping to end the extermination forty years ago won’t work, today, and they seem incapable of changing their focus.

Back then raising awareness and putting pressure on certain governments successfully led to the creation of CITES and the international ban on trading ivory.

That’s done. And it’s no longer working, because most governments are wholly convinced of the need to ban the ivory trade (even, I sometimes think, China) and because the world is widely aware of all kinds of animal poaching.

As Titeca and so many others point out, the trouble today is small ad-hoc groups of poachers and more organized middlemen, and many, many of them.

The mischievous attempt to put the rap on rogue organizations like the LRA is a terrible distraction and untrue: hard for the public to disconnect because the LRA is so horrible, and hard for CNN because it makes such a good story.

Ivory poaching today in East Africa is hardly different than robbing a 7-11 in the U.S. And it’s on a dangerous increase, yes, but the solutions are much more complicated than when Mama Ngina collaborated with the Emirates and used Sikorsky helicopters over the Serengeti.

The world’s complicated, folks. There’s no solution in your newspaper headline.

Better Watch Out

September 16, 2013September 18, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Better education does not come by rewarding school performance, according to an African study, but by rewarding the underlying causes of that performance.

America’s method is not going to help it get better. Africa’s method is already helping it to get better, and quite fast, too.

Fifteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa fund a regional organization that evaluates those country’s educational system and produces recommendation for improvement. SAMEQ is essentially the Department of Education for sub-Saharan Africa.

Unlike our Department of Education the most recent comprehensive study of primary and secondary education suggests that teacher and pupil evaluations are meaningless and become entrenched without a broader and more detailed look at that data.

Let me explain:

The Obama administration focuses on school performance and teacher evaluation. What the SAMEQ report discovers is that while performance is the ultimate metric, giving funds or withholding funds based on that performance is pointless, which is what the Obama administration does.

SAMEQ delves into the causes of current performance, and I dare say that they’re the same the world over.

And this simple type of analysis leads to unfettered conclusions.

“Pupil socio-economic status, background, sex, age, grade repetition, absenteeism, homework, and speaking the language of instruction at home” are the greatest determinants of a pupil’s performance, and thereby, the pupil’s school’s overall performance.

(The report later reveals a tantalizing analysis of grade repetition that suggests this is counter-productive. In other words, poor pupils who were retained did poorer in the long haul than poor pupils who were retained and matriculated, anyway.)

And the main contributors to these individual factors are “school resources, school location, pupil–teacher ratio,” and finally, Obama’s focus, teacher evaluation (which the report calls “teacher score”). But it’s critical here to place teacher evaluation on no greater a pedestal than the other important factors.

The report adds that secondarily but still very important, school location seriously correlates with overall educational performance, and that is essentially a wider metric supporting the importance of socio-economic background.

So what does all this mean?

First, I have to say that the study was outstanding. Read the study to see the care with which data was mined, the finesse with with which contributing factors were parsed out, and the enormous relevance of carefully determined variants. Unlike our own government studies which tend to top-load a study with a goal (like school performance), this was a legitimate scientific exploration.

SAMEQ must tread much more carefully on political toes than our own government agencies, so there was little outright recommendation. But it’s there not just between the lines:

Pupils aren’t going to get better until their socio-economic status improves, and schools aren’t going to get better until pupils get better.

The one agreement with Obama policy is that teachers matter a lot, and that teachers can become as entrenched as socio-economic policy. Certainly figuring out a way to enhance teacher performance would be dynamite in improving education.

But so importantly, this must not be the principal concern.

What SAMEQ shows is that government resources – far more restricted in Africa than in America – are poorly used when thrown at the schools themselves.

Using the fact that grade repetition has no effect on student performance, SAMEQ explains further: “High levels of grade repetition have been blamed for increasing the overall cost of schooling, because if many pupils repeat each year, school systems need to employ more teachers and build more classrooms.”

Thus, attempts to work within the system can backfire.

SAMEQ is comfortable with certain remedies that would be not so comfortable in the U.S. “Home Intervention” as successfully implemented in Malaysia, and to a lesser degree in Mauritius and the Seychelles, improves performance.

This means greater funding of social work, something currently anathema in most of America.

And SAMEQ pulls no punches in recommending outright that more of Africa’s limited resources for education should be directed to poorer areas than richer areas.

That’s a direct opposite from America, where school resources are mostly local, so are circular and support themselves. Redistribution is what’s required.

As with immigration, taxation and employment policies, Africa is way ahead of America on educational reform.

And Africa is improving … fast. Is America?

Good Morning, Nairobi!

September 13, 2013September 13, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This morning Nairobi got good news: the yellow-throated sandgrouse was photographed drinking in Nairobi National Park.

Scratching your head? Let me bring a smile to your face.

Will Knocker’s photograph above is of the three sandgrouse this morning in Nairobi National Park. (The inset is from somebody’s phone this morning, and that somebody must have been on a crane or something at the roundabout starting the street.)

Nairobi is fast becoming the second most important city in Africa, after Johannesburg. With this emergence has come more problems than you can shake your stick at. The city’s growth is unimaginable and not well coordinated. So next week there might be a high-rise being constructed on a site where a railway station is also being built.

Traffic – well, forget about traffic. Recently I was sent a picture of a bicycle pile-up in between two rows of congested vehicles on Uhuru highway. There’s a reasonable chance the inability of vehicles to move will lead to new, alternate forms of transportation, like walking.

It is, by the way, leading to new forms of work days. More and more people are going to work at ridiculously odd hours and coming home similarly, just so that going and coming will “work.”

Carved on one little side – I’d say right now about a ninth of the city’s bulging perimeter – is … absolutely unbelievably … a national big-game park.

Nairobi National Park is a legacy park to be sure. It hasn’t grown in size since it was first proclaimed in 1945 making it the oldest national park in Kenya.

But neither has it shrunk, and that’s the point.

I incorrectly predicted that it would. A highway was announced and work begun that would have transected the park and I offered a sad lament but presumed it was inevitable.

It wasn’t, and I ate crow. (Not pied crow.) Local conservationists prevailed. Yes, they prevailed on a technicality to be sure, but isn’t that how Mohammed moved the mountain?

And with efforts very similar to our American local conservation societies first modeled by Nature Conservancy, tracts of land on the opposite side of the park to the city have been secured as wildlife corridors into some of what’s left of Kenya’s wild Amboseli ecosystem.

The yellow-throated sandgrouse doesn’t come to town. It’s a country bird. In fact, it’s a prairie, massive wilderness bird. It lays 2-3 eggs in a ridiculously unsecured nest made in a slight depression in the ground. It doesn’t like people.

I see it in the Serengeti and the Mara, and cousins of it in Kenya’s Northern Frontier. I don’t see it at the mall.

Well, there you have it, a wonderful Friday piece of unfinished news. If Pterocles gutturalis made it through the morning commute, I guess I won’t give up trying.

The Most Precious Discovery

September 12, 2013September 12, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Slowly we are discovering a deeper layer inside earth that is renewing oil and gas, and now, the most important resource of all, water. Africa is jubilant.

February’s initial discovery in the far northwest deserts of Kenya was officially announced yesterday, and it is quickly becoming the most important story in Africa.

If estimates are correct, Kenya’s reserves of clean water have just been multiplied by ten. The daily consumption potential of Kenya’s current fresh water will be doubled.

Fresh water is one of Africa’s greatest problems. More than a third of the estimated 884 million people worldwide without access to clean water live in sub-Saharan Africa.

The aquifer of 250 billion cubic meters of water lies a thousand feet under one of the most inhospitable places on earth, and is similar to and even smaller than an aquifer discovered five years ago under the Sudanese desert.

That aquifer in Darfur has not been developed because of the violence in the area. Although the area in northwest Kenya is not wholly peaceful (my novel, Chasm Gorge, to be published soon is set in this area) there is little indication that tribal squabbles will impede this massive development.

The area is a sparsely populated one and diminishing resources is the friction between three hostile groups, the Turkana, Pokot and Borana. Their enmity has existed for centuries and has been exaggerated by population growth facilitated in part by better services and a modernizing government.

Quick access to large amounts of fresh, clean water in Turkana is likely to ease tribal hostilities in this case, and so would stand in marked contrast to what is happening in Darfur where hostilities have long ago matured into all out war.

Although distant, remote and very deep, the water discovery is so profound that Kenyan officials are looking into the possibility of creating a river as a method of transporting the discovery to more populated areas further south in the country.

But long before that happens, it’s clear that the people of Turkana will have new and sizable access to fresh water. While currently daily water needs in Turkana are almost exclusively for personal and urgent use, this new discovery raises the prospect of significant agricultural irrigation.

As with the earlier discovery in Darfur, it seems the aquifer is renewable and while the process is not wholly understood, the vast desert area may be sponging what moisture does fall onto it rather than give most of it up for evaporation, as previously thought.

The Kenyan discovery was a joint effort between UNESCO and several private companies whose technologies are normally used to discover deep-earth oil reserves.

Without UNESCO’s lead on the project it is likely it would never have happened. These new technologies are being monopolized for the discovery and extraction of oil. Once again, it’s the international community and its organized institutions that are saving lives and working for the ordinary soul.

We must wonder what is happening to Mother Earth as her insides are gutted out. But for the time being, there is only reason for celebration.

The Trials Begin

September 10, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The opening day in the trial of Kenya’s Deputy President, William Ruto, lifted the curtains from a gruesome, planned ethnic genocide that he allegedly orchestrated with the precision of an all-out war, including purchases of weapons from Uganda and The Sudan.

Accused of “enlisting political collaborators, former military friends, elders and media allies to commit crimes against humanity,” ICC Prosecutor Ms. Fatou Bensouda said she will call 22 witnesses.

Ruto is being tried simultaneously with Joshua Arap Sang, a radio broadcaster, who is specifically accused of using the radio station KASS-FM to mobilize ethnic forces when requested by Ruto.

“The prosecution alleges that the accused William Samoei Ruto and Joshua arap Sang intentionally exploited to their own advantage these deep-seated political, ethnic, social and economic issues during the 2007 electoral campaign.”

The 64-page indictment is a gruesome, detailed description of backdoor meetings, careful organization of weapons and money, and the meticulous assembly of a chain of command the prosecution is now calling “The Network.” Ruto was the alleged head of The Network.

Former ministers in the civilian government, former Army and police generals and commanders, district commissioners and even local youth leaders were all carefully organized into a chain of command with the sole intention of eliminating “unwanted communities,” in particular, the Kikuyu.

The Network was organized well in advance of the 2007/2008 election and would go into action, according to the ICC prosecution, if the election were lost by Ruto. Ruto was part of a coalition of western Kenyan tribes including the Kalenjin and Luo, contesting the reelection of Mwai Kibaki, who was a member of the country’s largest tribe, the Kikuyu.

As I explained yesterday, the Kikuyu and Luo and Kalenjin were historical blood enemies. Also as I’ve written earlier, the ethnic division over many years adopted social and economic characteristics, just as Northern Ireland became Catholic and poor and southern Ireland was protestant and rich; or as Christian Serbs in Bosnia were far better off than Muslims, there.

So the ostensible election of 2007 was almost quintessentially typical of the modern era: the poor, socialists, redistribute-the-wealth group versus the established, rich, capitalists already in power.

Yesterday’s first day of the Ruto trial did make real news. The ICC prosecutor backed off her public suggestions that Ruto explicitly was involved in the ethnic cleansing and painted him more as the backroom organizer, using Kalenjin proverbs and winks of the eye to order attacks.

That is a serious blow to the prosecution in this world court where proof of guilt is a much higher bar to attain than in most other sovereign courts around the world.

The only judgment issued by the Court yesterday was that the other trial of Kenya’s President, Uhuru Kenyatta, will be held on alternating four-week periods with this one, so that the sovereign nation of Kenya is never without a leader.

Remarkable.

And as you’ve guessed, Kenyatta’s trial will be very similar to Ruto’s. The two, now serving together as Kenya’s chief executives, are accused of trying to eliminate each other through ethnic cleansing.

Talk about Team of Rivals…

But at long last things are beginning to make sense, in the extraordinary Kenyan way that makes Shakespearean dramas look like third grade fairy tales.

Presuming Kenyatta’s strategy is similar to Ruto’s, the accused really believe they will prevail as not guilty. And with the ICC backing off the contention they gave explicit orders, for the first time in public, that seems possible.

And if that comes to pass, and if the two leaders of the historical arch enemies that wanted to kill each other, raise a modern Kenya from the ashes, what does that mean?

That like Obama threatening to bomb Syria was all that was needed to eliminate its chemical weapons, that trying to put the two Kenyan leaders in the clinker for the rest of their lives for trying to kill each other makes them friendly nation builders?

How good are these bad guys? Are miracles real?

“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.” – C. S. Lewis

And Now! Live! From The Hague!!!

September 9, 2013September 10, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

If you were riveted by the O.J. Simpson trial, you’ll want to adjust your cable contract to get NTV-Kenya: “Tomorrow! Live! The World Trial of Kenya’s sitting President and Vice President for Crimes Against Humanity!”

This doesn’t sound real. Neither Steven Spielberg or William Shakespeare could have concocted this one. This isn’t like a revolutionary tribunal. It isn’t Madame DeFarge and her fellow citizen hookers watching the old king hanged.

William Ruto, the Deputy (Vice) President of Kenya, flew to The Netherlands yesterday … with, by the way, 100 elected members of the current Kenyan Parliament … to stand trial in The Hague’s International Criminal Court (ICC) which the country of Kenya agrees has the authority to imprison those the ICC finds guilty for up to life.

The President of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, will begin his trial on November 12.

Oh, and by the way, the crux of the charges against Ruto was that he tried to kill Kenyatta’s supporters, and the crux of the charges against Kenyatta is that he tried to kill Ruto’s supporters.

The ICC initially was going to try them (and 4 others) all at the same time, but accommodated a Kenyan request that the country’s two top leaders ought not be out of the country at the same time.

How civil.

The bill to the Kenyan government for participating in this ultimate fiasco is astronomical by Kenyan standards. Just consider today’s expense report: Imagine George Bush flying back and forth in Air Force One (and probably Air Force Two to bring Republican Senators and Congressmen) to Amsterdam to allow himself to answer unpressed indictments by the ICC regarding his War in Iraq.

I thought a review of why we’re here might help you.

The court in question is the World Court, the ICC. Americans don’t know much about it, because America refuses to participate:

THE COURT
As of May 2013, 122 states are parties to the ICC, including all of South America, nearly all of Europe, most of Oceania and roughly half of Africa. Another 31 countries, including Russia, have signed but not ratified the treaty.

The progenitors of the ICC originated more than a century ago and include the Red Cross, when the world tried (and failed) to prosecute those responsible for the Franco-Russian War of 1872. The idea was reborn after World War I and then, again, after World War II. The Nuremberg trials finally prompted the United Nations to embrace the idea.

But having studied it endlessly and virtually created it, the UN was stymied
from setting up The Court by the politics of the Cold War.

In June, 1989, in response to worldwide drug trafficking and the imminent Bosnian War, the world more or less (including no America) got together and formed the court as an entity separate from the UN.

So even without America, China and full Russian participation, the Court has grown to represent world justice. Its famous trials include the wicked men of Bosnia, Liberia and Rwanda. These managers of genocide are now behind bars in Holland.

HOW DID KENYA GET THERE?
The democratic election in Kenya at the end of 2007 was miserably mishandled, almost certainly fraudulent and whatever else, too close to call. It was, however, the first truly free election Kenya had ever had, because the two main contestants for the Presidency were so far apart ideologically.

One was for the poor and socialist. One was for the rich and capitalist. And …

…one was from the country’s largest tribe, the Kikuyu; and the other from its second largest tribe, the Luo, who until that moment had basically spent all their history trying to massacre one another.

And so they did, again. This time with the extremely legitimate pretext of a major election gone awry. Within a month of the election, more than 1300 people had been killed but more importantly, in vicious videoed attacks that devolved into ethnic cleansing.

And even more important than that, really, more than a quarter million people were displaced.

The U.S., Britain and Kofi Annan put Kenya back together. Six months after the catastrophe, the two contestants were sharing power, and things were working out. In fact, they worked out so beautifully that Kenya’s then newly written constitution is really a model for modern governance.

Part of the all-party agreement that put the country back together was to determine who had fomented the violence and to prosecute them … in Kenya. It was almost an afterthought that added to the agreement that if Kenya couldn’t get it together to hold the trials, or to mount the investigation, that if Kenya wanted, the ICC would step in.

That’s what happened. Kenya couldn’t get it together. At first it just seemed like too herculean albeit too expensive a task. So the old Parliament that wrote the new constitution hemmed and hawed, debated and ignored, and finally defaulted to the ICC.

Which was really quite reluctant to take the case on. After all, as horrible as 2007/2008 was to every Kenyan, it was nowhere near as horrible as the cases the ICC had been hearing: like the Hutu massacre of 800,000 Watutsis.

The ICC did its work. Among those to be indicted were the leaders of Kenya’s biggest tribe, the capitalists, Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the founder of the country; and the leader of an influential smaller tribe hated by the Kikuyu and who had supported the socialists, the Kalenjin, William Ruto.

For organizing, financing and managing the slaughter of hundreds and attempted slaughter of hundreds of thousands.

Whoa. Embarrassing, to be sure. Kind of riled Kenyans of similar stripes. Parliament exploded but did nothing. Parliament considered giving immunity to these guys, but didn’t. The trials were set.

Then …

William Ruto and Uhuru Kenyatta filed to contest the election of 2012 after they’d been indicted.

Parliament choked. The Presidential Commission authorizing candidates didn’t know what to do. Parliament said do it. The two men indicted for crimes against humanity became candidates.

And then …

… these two murderous rivals combined to form a single party. The leader of the biggest tribe, Kenyatta, would stand for the presidency. The other guy, William Ruto and former arch enemy, would stand with him for the vice president.

And then …

… they won.

Tomorrow, I speculate on what the hell is going on, or, “How Good can a Bad Guy be?”

Don’t Forget Your Popcorn

September 6, 2013September 6, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Tuesday the Vice President of Kenya personally stands on trial in The Hague for crimes against humanity. Two months later, the President will begin his trial, there.

William Ruto, the Deputy President of Kenya, will be accompanied by about 100 recently elected Members of Parliament who obviously support him.

It is, indeed, one of the most curious performances of achieving justice the world has ever seen. A Nairobi commentator put it this way this morning:

“Most international criminal tribunals have been set up as courts of victors to punish the losers,“ explains Luis Franceschi, Dean of Nairobi’s Strathmore Law School, citing the great trials that followed great wars and historic massacres.

This time in Kenya, though, “The accused [are] not past rulers or sitting presidents, but newly elected leaders. We are witnessing one of those uncommon ironies where democracy seems to clash with justice.”

Add to this complexity yesterday’s action by the Kenyan Parliament to withdraw from the International Court that is holding the trials, and you have the kind of governmental and political mess that has stymied Kenya for so long.

There’s more! The International Criminal Court (ICC) is an independent, global judiciary created and supported by 122 sovereign nations. Kenya is one of those. Proposed as a part of the remedial actions taken after World War II to try war criminals, it became a serious global justice tool after opposition to it by Soviet block allies ended with the end of the Cold War in 1989.

The U.S. is one of the few nations to have specifically rejected the Treaty of Rome which formed the ICC. The other two – you guessed it – are Russia and China.

Yesterday in Kenya’s Parliamentary debate, America was invoked time and again as a reason for Kenya to withdraw.

In a finely worded statement the U.S. issued after the Parliamentary debate, undoubtedly hoping no one would read it because of the Syria Crisis and G20 meeting, America urged Kenya “to fulfill its commitments to seek justice for the victims of the 2007-2008 post-election violence.”

This is a major step back from much more severe statements America made earlier, including “severe consequences” to Kenya if action like this were taken.

Kind of hard to tell Kenya to go to trial in The Hague when you intend to ignore your staunchest ally and the rest of the world that are telling you not to bomb Syria.

This is a mess.

It would have been a mess even if the U.S. hadn’t muddled its diplomacy in Kenya or its image abroad, but believe me, that isn’t helping.

There is every indication at the moment that Kenya’s duly elected and pretty popular top two leaders will stand trial in an international court. Last week technicians from Kenya were allowed into the court chambers to hi-tech wire it up, so that people in Kenya could have real time coverage and communications.

The charges against them and three others are that they were the principals in organizing and funding if not actually managing the terrible violence that followed the disputed 2007/08 elections.

More than 1300 people were killed, many horribly, but perhaps more significantly more than a quarter million displaced. The issue of “IDPs” (internally displaced persons) remains a contentious and difficult one in Kenya even today.

The Hague is conducting The Trial because it was asked to by the Kenyan Parliament.

Not the current Parliament. The current Parliament is entirely new, the first one under a wonderful new constitution adopted last year. But the old Parliament that was viced together by Kofi Annan and others who finally brought peace to the country by March, 2008, first accepted that it must hold trials, then wavered, then asked the ICC to take over.

The ICC did so reluctantly and laboriously. But once things got going, they became unstoppable.

Neither the accused current president or vice president held significant power in the coalition government that brought Kenya out of the cauldron of violence into the new light of a really good constitution.

Both were charged by the ICC as being among the main culprits before they even announced they were running for the leaders of the country created by the new constitution.

The old Parliament debated furiously whether as accused they should even be allowed to stand as candidates, and finally decided they could.

Meanwhile, the ICC was rounding up tons of evidence. It takes the ICC years to achieve enough evidence to bring someone to trial, and in this case they did so very quickly. Trial dates were set initially before Kenya’s presidential election.

But it became clear at that time that the two accused were also very popular in Kenya. Negotiations that kept the old Parliament on board with the ICC successfully pushed the trial dates until after the elections.

Then, the accused won by such a slim margin that Kenya’s newly constituted Supreme Court finally had to affirm the razor thin outcome.

As Uhuru Kenyatta, the current president, and William Ruto, the current vice president, solidified their power and control over the country, witnesses that the ICC had assembled for the trial began to withdraw.

Of an original 30 witnesses, there are today less than half that willing to testify. You can imagine why.

And to make this entire blog meaningless, the process of Kenya withdrawing from the Treaty of Rome that it signed fifteen years ago could not possibly conclude before these trials are over.

Sane minds in Kenya implored Parliament not to become “hysterical” and do what they did yesterday, accomplishing essentially nothing but making Kenya look odd at best, juvenile at worse.

I am absolutely fascinated at this whole process. Clearly, Kenyatta and Ruto if convicted are not going to jail. They’d go home, first, and then stay there.

So why go through the antics in the first place?

They believe they can prove innocence. I suppose we should remain open-minded about this. You know, innocent until proven guilty, and all that. And to be sure a guilty verdict in The Hague requires a lot more evidence and certainty than in a normal court.

It is, indeed possible, that despite all the evidence so far assembled against these two men, they could be found not guilty.

Even so, they’re bad guys. We don’t need an international court to sift through the volumes of news reports that have already convicted Kenyatta and Ruto in the international court of public opinion and I believe that judgment has been a fair one. Although the U.S.’ stand is losing credibility, there’s not a single European power willing to engage either of these leaders.

But in the duplicitous world of global power politics, a not guilty verdict from The Hague might make an appointment in Westminster easier to arrange.

Stay tuned.

Don’t Walk on Safari

September 5, 2013December 28, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 9 Comments

As my clients well know, I don’t approve of walking safaris anywhere in East Africa, today. Tuesday morning another tourist was killed by an elephant near Tarangire National Park.

Thomas McAfee of San Diego was on a guided walking safari arranged by Tarangire River Camp where he was lodging.

The details are not complete, but reports of the local police report claim the incident occurred at 8 a.m., Tuesday, when McAfee and two others encountered about 50 elephant on their walk.

The report continues that the other two escaped by running away but that McAfee tripped and fell and was then killed by a charging elephant.

Tarangire River Camp is a respectable camp located just outside the park itself. Many similar excellent camps and lodges throughout sub-Saharan Africa located just outside the boundaries of a government reserve are not restrained by park regulations restricting walking. So as a sales tool they offer walking safaris.

Park regulations are strict regarding walking. Walkers must pay a special fee and must be accompanied by an armed ranger, but for the last several years in Tarangire, the main northern ranger post has declined to lead walking safaris.

I can only speculate as to why the rangers have declined to lead walking safaris, since there has been no official reason. But I suspect it’s the same reason I have: there are too many elephants, they are too stressed, and it’s too dangerous.

Be cautious, now, about unqualified criticism of Tarangire River Camp. Virtually every off-reserve camp I know in Tarangire, including my favorite, Oliver’s Camp, promotes walking safaris.

Walking safaris strike consumers as an attractive option to remaining in the car all day, and that’s understandable, and nowhere at no time have they been offered without the understanding of added risk.

The finest and most professional walking safaris in Africa are led by remarkably professional rangers in South Africa’s Kruger National Park.

And even those have had serious incidents, but notably the professional has been the one who has suffered most, and in all cases in recent memory the tourists were uninjured.

And, of course, incidents occur to vehicles, too. Most of these, in fact, are reported again in Kruger National Park, and the reason is quite simple: There are many more tourists, there, and many self-drive cars, unlike in East Africa.

In my long forty years of guiding safaris I’ve been threatened by animals, mostly elephants, dozens and dozens of times. Three times were very serious. Game viewing – anywhere in Africa – is not a walk through your local county forest preserve.

But times started to seriously change 10-15 years ago. Today the risk of an animal attack while on safari is greater than ever. The risk is easily avoided, but it requires a change in tourist behavior from what for so many years has been considered acceptable.

Don’t walk.

There are qualifications, of course. If you recognize the added risk, then there are places where that risk is less and where the professionalism and heroism of its rangers has a long history. And that’s in southern Africa, especially Kruger.

Zambia’s Luangwa Valley is also a place where walking safaris have been the featured form of game viewing for more than half century, and where the guides have avoided serious incidents for a remarkably long time.

And in very remote locations, for example in Kenya’s fine Bush ‘n Beyond camps in the distant Northern Frontier, walking is probably OK.

Why is it less risky in some places? Because of different animal behaviors in different places, and because of the skill and professionalism of those who might guide you walking.

East Africa, Kenya in particular, has made great strides in the skill and professionalism of its rangers. Tanzania much less so, and Uganda is horrible. But no country in East Africa has the training or supervision that passes my requirements for a safe walk in the wild.

And East Africa’s wild animal population is out of control. Both in terms of simple numbers (which is a main reason I enjoy going there), and because of unusually rapid increases in human/animal conflicts that are not occurring in southern Africa.

Last night I was reading my precious first edition of Theodore Roosevelt’s Game Trails. The book is fascinating on many levels but is mostly an account of his incredibly extensive big game hunt through Kenya and Uganda in 1909.

Many, many times he and his professional hunters, Cunningham and Tarlton, approached elephant on foot, and not always just to kill them. Sometimes, just to taunt them, as when Teddy jovially reports throwing sticks and rocks at one.

To be sure Roosevelt was an accomplished hunter and sportsman, but he was careful about hunting without Cunningham or Tarlton with him. But when he accidentally “ran into” his old friend and fellow conservationist, Carl Ackley, on a private journey released from his professional hunters, he didn’t hesitate accepting Ackley’s request to kill an elephant for the New York Natural History Museum.

In those days, with the prairies and forests and velds literally saturated with game, and few if any people living anywhere, including indigenous people, the human intrusion into the animal paradise was a clear and unmitigated risk – not to the people, but to the animals!

Elephant had been hunted for ivory for centuries, and no human approached them except to kill them. It was virtually the same for anything wild, a bird as small as a wheatear was a target. Roosevelt’s arsenal contained a variety of weapons capable of downing a mole rat.

The relationship between animals and man was clear. Hunter and hunted. And man was supreme. The list of hunter injuries was great as world sportsmen defied death by challenging wild animals: Lord Delamere and Governor Jackson enjoyed showing Roosevelt their wounds from great hunts gone awry, and I definitely felt that Roosevelt tried and failed to be so heroically scarred himself.

But every animal on the veld knew that ultimately there was no contest with man. Man always, always won.

That’s changed.

Protecting animals has tamed them. And it’s important to remind ourselves that “tame” is our definition, not theirs. We have manipulated wild animals so that we can approach them more closely and enjoy them, even as they wander in the wild.

We’ve now had more than a half century of this, and that means a good two generations of elephant and far more in the lesser animals. Wild animals in African parks grow up far less afraid of man than their wild and natural behaviors would otherwise intuit.

That worked beautifully for many, many years. But about 15 years ago it became apparent there were too many wild animals too densely packed into these protected reserves in East Africa, where the most exciting and supreme game viewing occurs.

That’s logical, of course. You protect something and it will prosper. And to be sure “too many” is my own assessment and nothing more scientific than that. Reading Roosevelt it’s quite clear there were more animals then, than now, but they were spread all over the place. Roosevelt reports “zebra attacks” within the Nairobi city limits. Nowhere did he wander, even over the volcanic rock of the northern frontier, without encountering herds of animals.

But they were never as densely packed together as they are, today, in a national park.

Over population has its own inherent risks. It stresses the animals as they compete for the same food sources and breeding areas. Tarangire in particular has the most serious problem, because its principal wild animal is the elephant.

Normal elephant behavior broke down in Tarangire about 15 years ago. That’s when we began to see unusually large groups of elephants (more than several hundred together at once), multiple families, feeding, breeding and moving together. That’s not natural for elephants, but it was mandated by their reduced space.

Global warming has radicalized the feeding cycles. Increased human populations on the periphery of reserves primarily pursuing farming exacerbates the human/elephant conflict.

So the tension between man and elephant increased substantially over the last 10-15 years. A terribly frightful incident on one of my own safaris in 2007, when a dear client was pinned on the ground by an elephant was the final determination I needed. (Stephen Farrand suffered only cuts and scratches after professional and quick action by one of my drivers.)

And since then the situation has been aggravated even further as unusual rains increased animal herds too fast, and as the Great Global Recession sparked increased poaching. And the poaching as I’ve often written is quite different from the corporate, helicopter, big-truck harvest poaching of the 1970s/80s.

The poaching today is generally by a small group of raiders on foot, because the value of a single tusk is so great, the small scale ad-hoc poaching proves economically worth it.

Imagine a generation of elephants, tamed to the point of putting their inquiring trunks through the top of my opened vehicles (as often happens), suddenly confronted one night by 4 or 5 men on foot trying to kill it.

Pursuit as was man’s only role in Roosevelt’s time is new to a young elephant in today’s world. Man is supposed to be that pretty admirer in a steel box. Suddenly that man is trying to kill it.

Contrary to many researchers and general mythology, elephant aren’t smart. They’re beasts, reactive, powerful and now … terribly confused.

Don’t walk among these tembo. We’ve known this for a number of years, now. We’ve been unsuccessful stopping the camps from offering the activity. It’s now your responsibility, and an easy one to embrace.